Friday, May 11, 2007

Voodoo smells bullshit....

Dear Abby Voodoo:

Please help me to warn your readers about an alarming trend happening in the teenage community: prom babies. I first heard about it while driving my teenage daughter to a lacrosse meet with several of her girlfriends.

One girl in the car, "Carrie," said she hoped this year she could have a prom baby. The girls were discussing two former classmates from last year's lacrosse team who had been unable to begin college because they had both become mothers at 17.

Both had deliberately planned to get pregnant on prom night — hence the term, "prom baby." Abby, both of the girls were studious and hard-working with bright futures ahead of them. One had been accepted to several Ivy League schools. Needless to say, their parents were devastated, and many adjustments had to be made for the new babies.

My daughter later told me that several of her other friends were considering trying to get pregnant near prom time so they, too, wouldn't have to deal with the pressures of going to college.

Apparently, parents are less strict about their children's whereabouts on prom night and let their teens spend the night in a hotel or at mixed-gender sleepovers.

I thought this sad trend might be local to our area, but during a class reunion in California, I learned the trend may be nationwide. One of my oldest friends, "Dana," confided during the reunion that she had become a grandmother at 43 due to her daughter having a prom baby.

As prom night approaches, please warn parents to talk with their children about the responsibilities of premarital sex and the dangers of a prom baby.

What The Fuck.

Dear What The Fuck:

Let's deal with the obvious first. You talked to people in your neck of the woods, which turns out to be a suburb of Atlanta, and you talked to people in California. Hardly representative of the entire population. Surely, being from the deep south, you've learned that most of the population of California are lunatics. Why do you listen to their bullshit and accept it at face value? Nationwide trend, my ass. This sounds like a bunch of stupid scare tactics trying to use a few random occurences found in the terminally stupid as an indicator of a 'nationwide trend' in order to garner interest amongst people who wouldn't bother giving this column a second glance while looking for pizza coupons. How about some hard evidence before you blab this bullshit? And you're a dad? You need a boot up your ass for being a gossip, cause that's what this shit sounds like. Men do not gossip. Men do things that generate gossip. You sound like the old hens down at the beauty parlor tut-tutting about some shit one of the other hens 'heard'. Seriously. I question whether you're really a male or actually some chick ghost-writing bullshit to fill a column on a slow news day.

Why would these kids talk about this shit in front of you? You're male. You're more likely to bust the kid's ass over stupid shit than some chick would. Why would these kids reveal deep secrets around an authority figure? Either you're making this shit up, or you and your fellow citizens are breeding a generation of genuine morons. In either case, you should be quite proud, as the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree.

Look at it this way. Women are opportunists. These women are young and nubile. Why would they want to get knocked up by some zit-faced teenaged boy or some knuckle-headed jock when they can go get knocked up by some rich old fart and make out better than they would had some teenage kid done it?

Pressure of college? Pressure? The mere thought of this is laughable. You can show up stinking drunk every day of class in a modern college and still earn a 2.5 GPA. There's no pressure in undergrad, unless you're an engineer, which your moronic brats most certainly will not be.

Now that we got that stupidity out of the way, let's assume you aren't completely full of shit, and that there are hordes of women out there looking to get knocked up on prom night so they can avoid the 'pressure' of college.

The solution is quite simple. You get in your daughter's face and tell her that she can do what she wants with her uterus. She's 18, (or is she 20? 25? Hard to tell from the overflowing stupidity contained in your article, sounds like the valedictorian at your school had a driver's license in kindergarten) and therefore is an adult. An adult has the distinct ability to do what they please. And for this, they get to pay the consequences for their foolishness. Your daughter wants to whore out and have a baby at 18, that's fine. You must inform her that she will take care of the kid, not you or her mother. You will not be a babysitter. You will not bankroll this kid. You will not be there to bail her ass out when she can't handle the pressure of being a mother. You must make this abundantly clear. If she doesn't have shit for brains, she will figure out that, with no safety net, this course of action is NOT A GOOD FUCKING IDEA.

4 comments:

k-dog
said...

Great job, Voodoo. The growing consensus is that the letter is a hoax (though possibly true in some respects). Using the phrase "prom babies" on Google.com results mainly in links to the letter and mentions of accidental pregnancies from prom night, none deliberate.

However, one has to say that even as a hoax, this is instructive on irrational female thought: that some girls would prefer 18 years of bringing up a child over 4 years at university. And there just might be a few instances out there where a girl has been under incredible pressure all her life from her parents to achieve and perform, down to being told that she will go to university, attend this specific one, and take this specific major, and she gets knocked up on prom night as a desperate act of rebellion because her parents simply would not otherwise lay off. But I'll bet these specific instances are few and far between.

Another whiff of BS is in the statement that one of the girls who had a prom baby to escape university had been accepted to multiple Ivy League schools. Just getting into one Ivy is a real hassle. Good luck with two or more.

You reacted as I suspected you would. Good call. The problem is that a BS letter like this might actually start a trend if enough teen idiots read or hear about it and think having a prom baby sounds cool. But no one credits today's teens with an overabundance of smarts and sense—or a lot of their parents these days either, for that matter.

Oh, yeah, I forgot. They were on their way to a lacrosse meet? Where? At Duke University? Har har. Seriously, how many high schools have lacrosse teams, let alone play in competition with other high schools in this sport? The BS smells stronger, the more one examines this letter.

To k-dog, there are a number of competitive high school lacrosse teams in the Atlanta suburbs, for the record.

Good call on this also Voodoo. This sounds like a rumor coming right out of Reader's Digest with the intent of scaring old people about the awful things that their kids are doing. If it is true, it might be the straw that finally breaks the camel's back: These parents can't continue to pay for these children forever, either by their refusing to put up with it any more, or by going bankrupt. And believe me, this is only the tip of the iceberg to the stupidity that kids this age are displaying right now.